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The Bar Scene

Someone at Caltech’s PR office sure was having fun:

Caltech Astronomers Describe the Bar Scene at the Beginning of the Universe
PASADENA, Calif.–Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years, indicating that spiral galaxies evolve in shape.

Oh, I can tell you all about the bar scene near Caltech. Dive bar: The Colorado. Beer for graduate students: Lucky Baldwin’s. Quantum margarita night: Amigos. Quantum beer night: drive five hours north to Albatross in Berkeley, CA.

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Doorbell Telephone

Yesterday I started to trace the wiring for our doorbells and figure out why they aren’t working (they haven’t worked since we moved in.) So I’m happily tracing away (a bit difficult since part of the basement has been finished and hence obstructs me figuring out where the wires are going) and then, whah, why the heck does the doorbell wiring appear to be connected to the telephone system? Anyone seen something like this before or am I just going crazy? (Okay we know the answer to the last one.)

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Bat's Sizzling on an Open Fire

Last night we went to see the new Batman movie. After attempting to see it at Paul Allen’s Cinerama (it was sold out), we headed down to the standard mall theater in downtown Seattle to view said film. Verdit for me: meh.
But what I found interesting was thinking about the reason for why I didn’t much like the movie. This is obviously because I am not a bat nor a superhero nor a heroine nor do I live in Gotham. Plus the portrayal of Two Face just hit to close to home. See how easy it is, kids, to analyze movie reviews when you just take reviewers biases into account!
Monday’s are snarky, snark snark days.

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Hacking Vision?

An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address of your press releases can be copied from the browser address bar. Somewhere a web designer should be shot.) and paper in Perception published here.
Continue reading “Hacking Vision?”

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We Beat the Reaper by Living Well

Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, passed away early today. If you haven’t watched Pausch’s last lecture, you should:

This lecture, when I first saw it, reminded me how important humor is for teaching. In other words, my students from last term can blame all my silly jokes on Randy.

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Fraud Fighting Quantum Computers

From Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston, we find a gem of quantum computer’s capabilities in an interview with Max Levchin, cofounder of Paypal:

…Its one of those things where, in the end, fraud is so nondeterministic that you need a human or a quantum computer to look at it and sort of make a final decision…

Fight determinism with determinism, but fight nondeterminism with nondeterminism! I like it! But can you fight determinism with nondeterminism? Why am I now singing “I shot the nondeterminism, and the nondeterminism won?”
(I’m pretty sure Max is waxing poetic here, cus from all I’ve read about him he’s a pretty sharp cookie.)

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Web Based Applications

You know that web based applications have really entered into your life when you click the Firefox icon and you wonder why the browser doesn’t appear and cover the document you are editing.